Contagion by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

is a vital client to our long-term stability. Thirty-odd days ago it asked for an internal review, which we expected in a couple of months. They now have told us they want it next week.”
         “Next week!” Terese all but shouted. “My God.” It took months to put together a new campaign and pitch it.
         “I know that will put the creatives under a lot of pressure,” Brian said. “But the reality is National Health is the boss. The problem is that after our pitch, if they are not satisfied, they’ll set up an outside review. The account will then be up for grabs, and I don’t have to remind you that these health-care giants are going to be the advertising cash cows of the next decade. All the agencies are interested.”
         “As chief financial officer I think I should make it clear what the loss of the National Health account would do to our bottom line,” Phil Atkins said. “We’ll have to put off the restructuring because we won’t have the funds to buy back our junk bonds.”
         “Obviously it is in all our best interests that we not lose the account,” Brian said.
         “I don’t know if it is possible to put together a pitch for next week,” Terese said.
         “You have anything you can show us at the moment?” Brian asked. Terese shook her head.
         “You must have something,” Robert said. “I assume you have a team working on it.” The smile had returned to the corners of his mouth.
         “Of course we have a team on National Health,” Terese said. “But we haven’t had any ‘big ideas’ to date. Obviously we thought we had several more months.”
         “Perhaps you might assign some additional personnel,” Brian said. “But I’ll leave that up to your judgment.” Then to the rest of the group he said: “For now we’ll adjourn this meeting until we have something from Creative to look at.” He stood up. Everybody else did the same.
         Dazed, Terese stumbled out of the cabin and descended to the agency’s main studio on the floor below.
         Willow and Heath had reversed a trend that began during the seventies and eighties when New York advertising firms had experienced a diaspora to varying chic sections of the city like TriBeCa and Chelsea. The agency returned to the old stamping ground of Madison Avenue, taking over several floors of a modest-sized building.
         Terese found Colleen at her drawing board. “What’s the scoop?” Colleen asked. “You look pale.”
         “Trouble!” Terese exclaimed.
         Colleen had been Terese’s first hire. She was her most reliable art director. They got along fatuously both professionally and socially. Colleen was a milky-white-skinned strawberry blonde with a smattering of pale freckles over an upturned nose. Her eyes were a deep blue, a much stronger hue than Terese’s. She favored oversized sweatshirts that somehow seemed to accentuate rather than hide her enviable figure.
         “Let me guess,” Colleen said. “Has National Health pushed up the deadline for the review?”
         “How’d you know?”
         “Intuition,” Colleen said. “When you said ‘trouble,’ that’s the worst thing I could think of.”
         “The Robert-and-Helen sideshow brought in information that National Health has lost more market share to AmeriCare despite our campaign.”
         “Damn!” Colleen said. “It’s a good campaign and a great sixty-second commercial.”
         “You know it and I know it,” Terese said. “Problem is that it wasn’t shown enough. I have an uncomfortable suspicion that Helen undermined us and talked them out of the two-hundred- to three-hundred-point TV commercial buy they had initially intended to make. That would have been saturation. I know it would have worked.”
         “I thought you told me you had pulled out the stops to guarantee National Health’s market share would go up,” Colleen